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Comment by zmb_ | Hacker News Reader

Yes they both broke the laws and/or contracts. However, they did it only to expose alleged misconduct or illegal activities of their employers. Therefore whistleblower protections should apply, and they cannot be convicted of those actions.

Whistleblowing always, by definition, includes breaking some law or contract to expose secret information (otherwise it would be public and already known). Since exposing alleged misconduct is a good for the society, someone should not face any penalty for doing so.

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The problem with your argument is that it's not that he blew the whistle, it's that he didn't do it in a responsible manner.

Also, whistleblowing doesn't always include breaking a law or contract. Also, he also exposed things that WEREN'T wrongdoing, and even the "wrong" things he "exposed" were pretty much already known and "wrong" is VERY subjective in this circumstance. The "wrongdoing" was not in what happened in the video, nor the number of civilian casualties, those are accidents and mistakes, but in the misrepresentation of those events. That is not really in and of itself wrong.)

And really, the thing that got him most in trouble were the hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables that exposed no wrongdoing but still exposed state secrets.

> And really, the thing that got him most in trouble were the hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables that exposed no wrongdoing

You've clearly not read the cables. they were responsible for at least two revolutions [1][2], and we're still learning from them.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/13/amnesty-interna...

[2] http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/wikihistory-did-l...

The cables themselves didn't express any American wrongdoing though. It expressed American opinions regarding other nations' governments and internal politics.

And either way I wouldn't be so quick to claim that inciting those revolutions is on the balance a positive thing for either Manning or Wikileaks, for the same reason that toppling Saddam's despotic regime was not (on the balance) a good thing.

>However, they did it only to expose alleged misconduct or illegal activities of their employers.

There is a reason Snowden was very careful to point out in his first public interview that he'd been very selective about what he chose to release and that he wasn't just mass dumping information like Manning did.

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